


My Silence Is Gold

by luteo4



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Gender Issues, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Magic, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-04
Updated: 2013-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-28 08:57:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/990160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luteo4/pseuds/luteo4
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zayn has a penchant for talking to himself, or his cat if she's around, because he is lonely, couped up in an old large estate. As a child of a superhero, Zayn is expected to settle down with one himself. He doesn't like the idea, for obvious reasons. Especially when his mother sends him off to some kind of trade school for the kids of superheroes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a bit of a shortish story, a writing exercise to get me in the mood for a novel I am going to write soon. That being said, it’s probably a bit of an unedited, and slightly indulgent mess. Nothing’s real here kids and all that blah blah blah. Move along. Go read a book or something nice like that.

This is morning. 

It pinches him awake, drawing off the blanket of sleep, and exposes his heart, which is now naked with awareness as it bolts from his ribcage with a thousand promises of life to numb flesh. Toes jut out from under the pile of moth bitten blankets as they instinctively stretch and come into contact with cold wooden floors. 

Damn.

Another jolt, this time less body and more mind, Zayn thinks, tingling synapses revolting against the feeling of cold cold cold, however that works, and the harsh reality that awaits.

Now is not the time to wrap his groggy mind about itself with fingers of curiosity. Minuscule synapses, like physics, are pointless to understand. Should just trust that they exist, and they know what they are doing, recoiling from the touch of hardwood flooring.

Far more pressing matters are at hand. Such as the thousand miles of useless ancient ratty blanket enveloping him, which are supposed to help avoid this moment all together.

Toes meet the damn chilly wooden floor again and again though.

Maybe if he knits a few more feet, just maybe, the next morning this happens, toes will be met with warmth. Because if it’s up to him, Zayn will continue spending each night sleeping on the floor next to the couch. Old habits dye hard. And making a nest of blankets and pillows rescued from his actual lonesome bed helps him to somehow hold on to that child inside of him. 

He turns round and around, working feverishly to get the blankets back to encompassing his toes, trying to find the ease necessary to reallocate a few necessary miles of blanket. First the tangerine protests. Then the navy cries out. And heaven forbid if the peach yarn didn’t seize up too, cramming his limbs into a straight jacket. The taupe yarn ties the knot.

“Fuck, all I ever want is bloody warmth for my toes,” Zayn mutters under his breath. 

“Watch your mouth.”

Zayn seizes to jostle the nest of blankets around. His mother precedes the crack of dawn? 

“For crissakes, don’t stop breathing, Zayn.”

She’s not supposed to know. No one is. He and his nest always recede back up the stairs before the tendrils of light creep in and his toes fall off from the last bits of bitting chill. He always leaves a blanket behind, tucked in around the man who will never feel the physical cold. Maybe it helps keep the cold tendrils at bay in his mind. Zayn hopes.

“I have always known,” she whispers sadly.

Suddenly, Zayn’s inner child slips under a wave, it’s foot loosing hold on a rock slick with embarrassment. ‘Childish’ is the new heat seeping into the waters, lapping away at this moment, souring all the countless others. All the other nights suddenly appear foolish, leering at him, betraying him with laughter. 

Bless her soul, his mother parts the waves with a simple admission, understanding pouring from her eyes in silent screams tripping over themselves in haste to rescue Zayn’s innermost child. She will let him have this, as much as she has always wanted this for herself. 

“No no no, I do feel you on this,” she hastily blurts, campaigning for the cool nonchalant mother award. She will die silently behind her fake apathy if it means her son will keep those fingers prying open his own trusting heart. Hope and innocence should never be given reason to entirely vacate that miraculous muscle. 

Zayn pulls some blanket over his face full of receding embarrassment, and mumbles a ‘thank you,’ unaware of her sacrifice.

“Yet you are miffed as to why you have back problems,” she muses while trailing back up the stairs. 

Zayn eases further back into his blankets of memory, ignoring the hard wooden floor. There are countless nights wrapped up here. Nights knit into threads of nocturnal flowers that emit a peace unrivaled. A dew that is bitter with the taste of his father’s booze collects like beads on a spider’s web, trapping him at the foot of this couch. Witness to the only moments his father lies in peace, passed out from liquid suppressant and the exhaustion of agony.

Zayn misses none of it. Must need be here. Must find what’s left of his dad in the near silent slumber, and spin it into something, anything other than what appears as a hallow cave. This is what draws him to sleep in a nest of blankets at the foot of a couch on nights where his father stumbles home, pissed drunk. The man is full of pleasant blank stares and hands jabbing innocently at the bazaar yellow paisley couch that greets him upon a free fall, face down, mumbling trains of nonsense that dance over Zayn’s drooping eyelids.

Zayn’s already there waiting, long before his old man arrives. Hoping to be noticed, to catch a glimpse of the man that is never really there. His fingers are poised, ready to latch onto live spirit and drag it kicking and screaming back to the surface by those eyes. Eyes that are only ever perpetually drowning, never noticing. They hide, obliviously searching for something amidst this torrent of bubbles his mind leaves trailing in a cloud to the surface, while it sinks into a bottomless world.

It’s too dark here, to dark to find anything. Zayn shudders in the straight jacket of his blankets, knowing. Whatever it is does not want to be found. Erased itself from existence.

It’s on nights like these, that the barriers are thinest, that the string is shortest, and Zayn’s chances are greatest though. 

It was a night like this, when he was just a child, that he first melted into a nest of old blankets that smelt like moth balls and grass that sheep graze on in the highlands, and fell prey to his curiosity like a cat.

And, oh, not once since then, has his dad coughed up so much as a thread of gold for Zayn to cling to. He’s lost track of how many lives he’s lost waiting around. He’s the oldest cat around town.

Royally pissed off he is. Dead beat fathers can row themselves to the other side of the lake. Compliments of their bitter children who have waited patiently.

Zayn sits up, arching countless icy arrows from his eyes at the passed out deadbeat on the couch. Usually, when he can’t sleep, he stares for hours, afraid of missing something if he closes his eyelids shut tight with slumber. Not tonight.

Shattering the moment, Zayn stumbles up and slips out of the den, dragging the nest of blankets trailing behind him like they are parting a sea of angry cats, and moves unknowingly with the gliding ease of a superhero up into his room, sliding into bed. Turns out it wasn’t morning yet, just the full moon glowing with the hum of a thousand night creatures now wafting through his bedroom windows. This does not happen in the den, which has rows of books in place of windows, stuffed with lifeless pages which block out the moons reflection. 

It’s the harvest moon, and things out in the gardens are beginning to grow restless with age, tipping threateningly over into the next age, decay. Rain comes soon. The scent will change.

He’s mildly awake in the calm of this night, the creatures having nipped at his heartbeat, nagging it along. 

Mum had been lurking around, with apparent regularity, strangely restless and traipsing simultaneously with Zayn, adrift in his dreamlands while sprawled on wooden floors, through the night. 

For a first, he will not waste a full night searching for something unreachable in a man hurtling through time for the unreachable. It is absurd, childish even.

Zayn sinks into bed, folded into a fitful torrent of expletives hurled at his receding dreams and the empty promises of his father’s enigma. 

There’s a black cat with blue eyes that sidles up to his side and digs herself in to the slumber party. That would be his beloved Milo. Wherever she was before, Zayn is grateful she is by his side now, with her presence strongly jutting into his existence. Milo is an immeasurable force, yet somehow under restraint, always threatening to divulge too much.

The complete opposite of that man lying passed out on a couch, always making Zayn feel like an intruder.


	2. Chapter 2

The grooves of purpose are fading from their place where his wild energy channeled, just hours before. Her selfless effort is now erased from these grooves, where she guided Zayn by simply letting him be, etching over all those nights she had found him lying, wrapped in his blankets on the floor.

She would never divulge to him that its instinctive, that she let him, nor how she knew, sleeplessly wandering the corridors of their mansion with a silent understanding.

Now the heart shaped muscle lying perched in Zayn’s ribcage is already running a muck in spite of every puff of smoke from his clove cigarette, having already made the choice. Remove the purpose, Nell notices, and watch the urgency what with the long tamed colt charges, having already destroyed their morning lessons. A horse that couldn’t take the bit not for the want of trying. 

“Lessons are only going to further exacerbate this,” she admits to herself. 

“I am well done with this.” Change is a good thing, with the stroke of his match, and a light for another clove cigarette, his heart exhales, emptying now entirely. Zayn convinces himself it’s a reasonable trade, an exchange of smoke for hope, calm for the nerves of a restless child, spice for the bitterness of disappointment. Things are shifting, not necessarily sensibly.

‘I gave so much up for you,’ Nell exhales silently behind her pursed lips, perched at the windowsill above Zayn, who’s poised, ready to launch himself from the back veranda. He could pour bales full of nicotine into his blood stream, and the cheetah would still not slow enough to be caught by the most eager of human eyes.

At a tender age, his eyes, already large embers, would grow as large as saucers. He’d get worryingly restless, already fully alive with his heritage. This rendered eating food impossible. One time, as on instinct, she’d pressed the unloved sweet potatoes into his hands, hands which have a life all of their own accord, and he calmly went to town, fashioning beautiful things like his creator before him. Nothing could compare to the original of course. But still, mesmerizing.

When he was a little older, she’d press paint or pencil, or whatever, in his hands, and he would run with that through forests of paper. There’s a folio tucked away somewhere in the den library. Piles of seeming junk became sculptures strewn about the house, at odds with the ancient decor. 

But then he had suddenly calmed. Then she had witnessed one night, Zayn dragging the contents of his bed down into the den, and building one of those makeshift fortresses that kids love to build. He set up camp, staring at his father with a most livid determination. She let it be until last night, now she has ruined it.

Now, there’s just the very present cigarette dangling from his mouth as he wanders around the garden, staring absentmindedly. Uncannily similar to his father Zayn is, staring off into space like that. Only he pulses, vibrates with energy no amount of wine could ever wash away.

“I wonder, Sahar, whether I shouldn’t have home schooled him. Sent him to the school instead. At least there he could have friends, find his superhero.”

Having a deadbeat for a husband means navigating through the murky waters of parenthood much alone. These conversations are one sided nightmares not fit for anyone.

“Certainly he’s going to be clueless when he does get there,” not yearning in the slightest to take her focus off of her son’s aura, now dangerously bright and unfocused.

Silence. Did Sahar get what she was implying?

Looking away from the boy wandering the gardens, and directing her gaze through the doorway to the den across the foyer, her eyes focus on that hideous couch her father found in a market while traveling somewhere east, and the man sprawled on it, blankly staring at a static t.v. screen. T.V.s should have gone out of style after the war.

“Look, your son is growing up Sahar. I need you here, can’t do this alone you fucker. Now would be the time-” 

“To go to therapy?”

“Really? No. The chauffeur will take you later.”

“Where’s the wine, Nella?”

“Your son has a habit of painting with it. He has lots of habits. Worrying habits some of them. We need to get him out of here. I need to.” More to herself now, “There are so many things I haven’t told him. I don’t think I can.” 

Damn her husband. There are gardens flourishing in Zayn, things beautiful only a mother can see, and trampling on them, a herd of bulls coursing through his blood with increasing fury. Superhero genetics. Damn her mother too, and her mother’s mother. And the whole lot of ancestors. What good is being nearly entirely superhero, but not having outright powers of any nature? At least not ones that can fix a loved one. She understands what is happening to Zayn. She’s learned to control the oceans churning in her blood. She shouldn’t ever have had to.

“Nor should he.” Milo saunters up to Nell, eager to help.

“That’s why I let him spend allll those nights channeling his oceans at his father.”

Milo thinks she has gone the way of poetic here. Something Nell has passed to her son. It’s unfortunate sometimes, this obtuseness. 

“Could Zayn simply be aware? Perhaps he is tired of trying to stay in control.” 

“I was clueless until my father told me. No one has told him a damn thing.”

“Unless Sahar suddenly had a moment of brilliance,” Milo jokes, trying to lift the mood.

“Milo, Sahar wouldn’t know. Wouldn’t know how to give. You superheroes only take.”

“Hey, not fair!”

“Well it’s true. Zayn’s body is steadily charging towards that cliff edge, carried by the electricity in his blood. It’s meant to feed someone. Just how it is.” 

“And you fail to understand that I know this? Nella, I had a husband lest you forget.”

“I ought to have known better than to let this go. I have failed him like I have failed Sahar.”

“You can not blame yourself for his faltering hope.”

“But I wanted it so bad for him, for my own selfish reasons too. How could I not want my husband back? How could I not place hope in our child to make it happen. I have failed Sahar.” Pools of disappointment settle in her mind, making murky all but the memories of her imminent failures as a wife.

Milo hisses at the thought of Zayn being used in such a manner, and swats at any notion that Nella could be at fault where her husband is concerned.

“You can not also blame yourself for Sahar’s state. If anyone, blame your parents.” 

Nell stays silent, letting all the unsaid curses echo through the high vaulted rooms of the old mansion. Her parents are dead. She’d gone along with their plan, happy to release the furry in her blood on someone else, to tame it as intended. There’s no one to blame anymore though. Instead there’s gilded walls to hurl her frustration at. Useless.

“So you are sending Zayn to the school?” Milo makes to steer towards the light.

“Yes.”

“Good, then you can make to fix your slothenly handling of Zayn at least, before it is too late.” Milo wraps herself around Nell’s feet, hoping her softness will smooth out Nell’s tidal waves of anger, and then hurries down the corridor, after some mouse or something. The curse of being stuck as a cat. 

Nell reverts her attention to the garden. Zayn is now sitting in the Japanese garden, poised like a statue of Buddha on a mound of moss, smoking yet another clove. She’s not sure whether this is ironic or not.

Damn her son for taking her place at the foot of that couch.

“I take it all back Zayn. I need your father,” she admits to herself, quietly vibrating the glass pains of the window with her urgency. “I can’t release your floodgates, so you are going away. Sahar can release mine again,” she says in an act of defiance.

“You will find someone there to do the same for you.” The window pains shutter in agreement again, chiming to the tune of her hope. 

\--------------------------- 

Zayn’s fingers are sticky with wine. They stick to the paper thin layers of a cigarette. They stick to the air flowing around him. The painting he just chucked across the room before pelting himself out into the garden for the second time today, lies sticking to his mind. 

Ironic, this wine. He can’t escape it. Not when it keeps his father subdued, or flows with the creative impulses springing out of his fresh tears, reminding him of so many things. Fresh with a memory from last night, his fingers glide a clove to his mouth and a flame ignites, somewhere beyond the tip of his nose. It is so easy to forget, being detached from his body lately, how something as simple as lighting a cigarette happens. This startles him more than the mystery flame did. Where is his body running too?

The memory. He’d given up for the first time on his father last night. He’d proclaimed it out loud just this morning. It was now afternoon, and the statement has had time to settle in to his empty bones. He is well done like a charred piece of meat. He blames it on the cigarettes. Seems logical. Or his mother.

“She’d said it was alright though,” he voiced, clove dangling precariously from his lips like smokers more often than not let happen, letting his voice float over the sprawling beds of flowers. “She made me sit through her lessons this morning. And when I couldn’t take anymore, she let me out here.” 

It’s true. She can see his fidgeting listless soul begin to drift off, and he’s thankful for that. Just another reminder though, of what his blood holds. And where it comes from. But he doesn’t understand it. It’s a curse if he is going to be anxious for the rest of his days. Whereas his mum is calm, no superhero blood in her veins. 

“I don’t know for sure, though. She doesn't talk about it, about anything really,” as if answering a question the wild violets to his right asked.

“But then her mood changed when I returned. Watched me like a hawk watches it’s future prey, as I painted. ‘Zayn dear,’ she said, ‘You are going to the boarding school. You will learn your place, as I have, find your superhero, and marry her. I can’t home school you anymore.’’

What? Her words carried intention. They were succinct, dripping with electricity.

His mother has always been fairly stoic, so this should be no surprise. A woman of few words. “Finally something I get from her and not the deadbeat.” It’s true, Sahar spills galaxies of nonsense words most especially when he is being manic. 

Apparently things are not alright though. She’s sending him away. Man, this is all he’s ever known. He never goes outside the walls of the estate. He knows this, for safety reasons, is even alright with it. There’s so much he doesn’t know. No one talks, not even the house. Sometimes he wishes Milo would, instead of purring, tangling herself around his feet.

There had been a war. It involved superheroes. Lot’s of people died, innocent people. His grandparents. That’s why they now have this dripping mansion. That’s all he knows. Taking another puff of clove, Zayn imagines the pain on the faces of these people, and remembers the wine stains drying on that canvas. 

They match.

He inhales sharply, coughing on the cigarette smoke.

“Damn. I need to quite this before it’s too late. Find something else to calm my nerves. Maybe opium? Dip into Sahar’s medicinal stash? No, addictive personality. Bad idea.” He looks at the patch of papaver somniferum growing some meters away, tantalizing as it may seem. He wonders how you get opium from the same seeds you bake into bread.

Zayn grabs another clove cigarette, and then another, puffing through them with the urgency of a waterfall swiftly doing what it does best. Maybe he should stop painting. He knows he’s never going to have superpowers, but then things like this happen. He goes and paints a wine portrait of pain and then visions of people dying in the wars flash over his eyelids, searing his eyelashes with blood. 

“Man, mum’s got nothing for me here, she’s all normal. And Sahar’s a fuckin’ useless sack of ashes for a father.” That reminds him of why he gave up last night. What’s the point anymore? He’s grasping at straws here and coming up empty handed. 

“I know, won’t even pet me, dumb he is?” Milo wanders over, forgetting the mouse. Zayn’s being angsty judging by how he flew up off the mound of moss, jabbing his clove in the air like a dagger. 

“You can sit back down Zayn.” She swats the cigarette out of his mouth once he settles again, leveling her eyes with his smoldering embers. Does he know there’s a jungle going up in flames in his eyes?

“That’s not how I thought your voice would sound. Wait, you just spoke, and not in a meow.” Wait, he just obeyed his cat.

“Clearly.”

“But-”

“So many questions, and no one to answer them for us.”

“Us?”

“Hey, I am in this with you.”

“Curiosity killed the-”

“Shut your pie hole, please.”

“Sorry. I just had to.”

“It’s not really true you know. I also have 13 lives, not 9.” Or at least that’s what is understood, by the experts. Meh, she’s not about to test the waters.

“Oh that seems a much more logical number.”

“You would think.”

“So...if curiosity doesn’t kill you, then why do you need lives, as in plural?”

“Time will hopefully tell.” Man, this kid hits the needle on the head.

They sit for a while next to each other. Zayn indian style on the soft mound of moss, Milo respectively in her regal cat position, as she calls it, hind legs tucked underneath her upright body, arms, or front legs, rather, extended, holding her face up. Her tail brushing erratically at Zayn’s side. She’s good for that whole comforting thing. Her nose is at the perfect height to catch all the floral scents wafting through the gardens. The perfume is going to be so different in a few weeks time. She kind of forgets what her human sense of smell was like. On that note, time to end this void of voices vocalizing, she purrs to herself.

“So why all this huffing and puffing?”

“Well,” he hesitates, nearly jumping off the moss into the nearby pond again, “things happen. Like I painted the pain on the faces of all these people that died in the war, which I know nothing about. And mum just told me I am expected to settle down with a superhero or something like that. Whom I am going to meet at boarding school. And why’d she say ‘the’ boarding school? Why am I so anxious? My blood feels like it is boiling!”

“You are in this tizzy because you don’t even find women attractive. At least, as far as I can tell. You’ll roll with the punches as far as everything else is concerned.”

“I don’t?” He has a hard time understanding how she is so calm. A cat thing?

“Do not what?” Ignoring Zayn’s last thought.

“Find women attractive?”

“Nope.”

“When were you planning on telling me?”

“Just now. Seems appropriate.”

“Milo, what gives you reason to believe?”

“If you will, Zayn, I have a sense for these things.” She stops herself from divulging more like an eager guru would. It’s not her place. Not sure whose place it actually even is. At any rate, this could quickly veer into memories that she really does not want to dig up.

There’s that rising feeling of childishness welling up from his toes again. He feels so clueless, so inadequate. His fingers are going numb with the acid bite of his ineptitude. He’s slipping under the deceptively calm of the lake again. When will he learn to stop slipping on rocks?

“Zayn dear, you could not have known. I am sorry for telling you this way.”

“Yes I could’ve. This is something I am supposed to just know.”

“No one goes about these things the same way.” For all the knowledge and wisdom Zayn does posses, clutched with an eager tight grip to his chest, it only comes from books and the hallowed space of this estate. 

“But I could’ve-”

“Could have what?”

“I don’t know,” he sighs, fingers trailing around for a match and a clove.

“Zayn, dear, your mother has sheltered you, with good reason, though I do not necessarily agree with it-”

“With good reason?”

“Yes. And where does that leave you?”

“Tell me, please.”

“With little experience and no friends.”

“I have you. But had I known you talked all this time, jeez man, you don’t know how much I have wanted you to talk to me.”

“I am flattered. So here I am. To tell you that outside these walls are myriads of people. And if you were out there, you could tell who and what you are attracted to. But having not had this interaction, you could not possibly know.”

“Something like that, huh?”

He thinks about that. It’s not like there were ever a shortage of people around. People visit his mum, sometimes his dad. They’re always kind to him. There is the house staff, the estate staff. But Milo is right, no one gets close enough. Their are kids that live near by, he knows. They have been over. But Zayn has always been a recluse, in the nicest sense possible. It’s all he’s ever known. And he’s sure his mother controls the ins and the outs of the estate. Sure, he knows with about as much surety as possible, that there’s a world outside. 

He suddenly feels small. Is it possible to crawl into his skin, where the freshly inked tattoo the gardener gave him the other day resides? It’s a seedpod, a vanilla bean, slightly cracked open. Just bellow his left peck along the rib. Seems safe in there.

“What’s the big deal anyways, what if I don’t want to be attracted to anyone?”

This stills Milo’s itty bitty cat heart. Oh it matters. Zayn is daft, and it is almost endearing, if it weren’t for the weight of the world. She’s going to have to tread nimbly here. 

“That’s just it. In here it does not matter.” She bites her tongue, knowing that it does matter as she watches his dangerously buzzing energy coil off his olive skin, smelling like bitter orange petrichor and, obviously, cloves.

“But out there in the world, it very much matters. In the minds of people, lie sleeping giants, to whom these kinds of things matter. Wars happen because of those sleeping giants. They wake up, and they rage, destroying their human homes, and each other.” Boy does she know.

“Oh. Just like in books?”

“Fiction does not lie, oddly enough. So guard yourself. When you go to school, guard yourself.” Ideally it should be safe at the boarding school. What it was designed for. You just never know.

“What do you think mum will think?”

Milo hesitates again. This is going to be painful for Nell. But she will understand, she will. The hard part will be letting him out of her immediate reach to attend the boarding school.

“You are safe here. Although, she does want grandkids.”

“Shit, that’s not going to happen. I don’t even want to marry. Look at my parents. Marriage is dumb.”

“Yeah, does not mean it is worthless though.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. And so too will you some day.”

“Naw.” 

Alright then. Milo decides to leave it at that. The bats are slowly edging out of the recesses of her mind, and it’s leaving her stomach unsettled. 

“Why can you talk?” He’s not sure whether this is magic or superpowers at work.

And the bats have flung themselves straight into the path of the midday sun chariot, darkness descending. Eating a mouse now seems furthest from what is desirable.

“Because I am a shapeshifter,” she pauses. “Or rather, I was.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew! How does a tangent writing exercise become a beast of it's own accord?

**Author's Note:**

> Alright. That's a mess. This is just an exercise, in preparation for a novel I am about to write. A second chapter is on its way, and will be posted soon.
> 
> The title is taken from the song ; john by iamamiwhoami


End file.
